Case Study in Utter Bullshit: Intellihub.com
The Incredibly Obvious and Overwhelming Evidence that Intellihub is Disinformation
I re-listened to two excellent podcasts last night:
Mickey Huff at Operation Censored podcast: https://kpfa.org/program/project-censored/
Ms. Kavanaugh on WhoWhatWhy's podcast: https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/02/02/truth-decay-diminishing-role-facts-public-life/
Mickey Huff at Operation Censored is a very credible person in my world, as is KPFA, and I should have included him in my original post on this topic.
Although the Rand Corporation is not on my list of credible organizations generally, I think anyone listening to this particular podcast and this particular researcher will agree that this particular academic representative is earnest and informed on the subject.
Mickey and Ms. Kavanaugh agree, despite being in different podcasts, that there is a crisis in media and journalism that some refer to as "post-truth" or "truth decay", but which I have called "Truth Never", but there is no need to quibble about terminology because we mean the same thing. This is, of course, not to say that no Truth exists anywhere, but that if those of us who do not have our own spy agencies and mega-corporations want any of it, we are going to have work for it. Mickey calls it 'media literacy' and I think this is basically correct. Some might call it 'savy', I simply see it as a part of critical thinking and good writing. In my blog here on Steemit I am attempting to demonstrate and/or teach by example how to determine whether or not a source is legitimate as I have done in these posts, for which I have earned around $2.00 and a few flags, but not a single attempt to disprove what I am saying beyond various pitiful personal attacks and sad complaints that there are not enough pictures:
https://steemit.com/familyprotection/@mindhawk/privacy-workshop-6-part-2-case-studies-in-authenticity-and-lack-thereof
https://steemit.com/conspiracy/@mindhawk/research-exercise-the-psychological-operation-known-as-max-spiers
https://steemit.com/analysis/@mindhawk/analysis-disinformation-and-infiltration-on-steemit-1
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@mindhawk/why-i-think-the-conscious-resistance-is-bullshit-or-worse
https://steemit.com/steemit/@mindhawk/invitation-to-disobedient-media-and-suzie3d-to-answer-basic-questions-about-their-work
And my lengthy post on the sources I consider most credible(so that you don't think I hate everything):
https://steemit.com/truth/@mindhawk/truth-now-links-1-actual-journalism-on-the-internet
My method is simple. Credible sources are referenced to and by other credible sources, the opposite is true for disinformation. Actual journalists and news organizations do not come in packets like seahorses to which one must just add water. People who state their beliefs, for instance anarchism or occupy wallstreet, can be analyzed by holding their actions against their stated allegiances. The priorities of writers also tell us a lot about who or what they are.
Lest I be considered someone who only finds bad things out about people I investigate, before we get to intellihub let's take a recent case where I give a journalist a pass. Consider heavy.com's writer Tom Cleary, who recently wrote an informative article about Parkland:
https://archive.fo/YW1WV
I have wondered for a long time about Heavy.com, I have found some good news there but a lot about the organization's background is a bit thin for my tastes. Consider their wikipedia:
https://archive.fo/Bn5Ay
Now I don't know Simon Asaad or David Carson, they are however people who take credit for their work and it mentions their background is Spanish in nature. There are no major controversies listed(as with junk sites like mintpress) and their background in entertainment is clearly stated, but they began doing more news in 2012.
Consider the writer Tom Cleary's About page:
https://archive.fo/ijsjI
He has written quite a few articles about many subjects, a lot of which is sports. A lot of his articles are of the '5 facts you need to know' variety which is actually a pretty decent concept in my opinion. He has a background writing for small papers with websites in the northeast United States, the Connecticut Post, New Haven Register and Register Citizen, all of which still have homepages with actual journalism on them covering actual local news of the general interest variety. I don't see anything sketchy about any of these sites. If you do, please let me know in comments.
So, now that I have done what is known as Due Diligence on Tom Cleary, I will consider his writing on the Parkland shootings.
The reason I picked Intellihub for this article is because it is another one of the sites that seems to have taken over reddit's r/conspiracy forum. Like Yournewswire, zerohedge and mintpressnews, intellihub has received a lot of upvotes in the past in a forum where I personally can't get above 0 and most of the things I find credible also have 0 upvotes, although there are exceptions that always make me wonder.
Today zerohedge and mintpressnews have made it to the front page with their now obvious brand of 'don't pay attention to trump, pay attention to the DNC' and 'the united states is the source of all evil and we rejoice at anything that embarrases it but we will never ever be critical of Russia no matter what' manipulative disinformation. The Sun-sentinel and salon articles are good, Inquisitr is a site that I will probably investigate in the future as I am seeing more and more of that site around.
Intellihub, for starters, has a stupid name. It is a mashup of "intelligence" and "hub", ostensibly meaning it intends to be a source where spies come to share all their best information. Which is stupid. That's not what spies do. At best, it could be a spot where people come to feel themselves like they are getting some kind of inside story that spies leaked out by accident. Again, this is not what spies do.
Let's examine the article and follow the thread as far as it takes us:
https://archive.fo/pbKJd
This line caught my eye:
"An NBC News report gives the official timeline of events:
Within barely two minutes of being dropped off, Cruz started firing into four classrooms in Building 12, returning to two of them to shoot again, Israel said."
Aha! They quote NBC News, certainly it will be possible to find the original quote right? Actually yes.
NBC news does in fact report this:
https://archive.fo/lnUpB
But look at all the other sites that report the exact same quote along with intellihub:
yonews.org
onnlive.com
www.wxxv25.com
thoughtcrimeradio.net
1newsnet.com
truthinourtime.com
invesetmentwatchblog.com
thedailycoin.com
prograssing.com
studionewsnetwork.com
robinwesternra.blogspot
yournewwire.com(already known disinfo)
sgtreport(already known disinfo, muted in first month on steemit)
41NBC.com (page offline)
stateofthenation2012.com
blackswanalert.com
seznam.name (whaa?)
Do any of these sites have names that DON'T sound stupid? Are you going to rely on blackswanalert.com for anything? (lol nope)
How about the title of the article from Intellihub?
Doing a DDG search for "Teacher grazed by Parkland shooter's bullet: 'Shooter was in full metal garb," returns:
https://archive.fo/MDAvg
I count over 10 sites with stupid names carrying the exact same article title, sgtreport and milleniumreport apparently have it word for word. It was reposted to reddit and voat with the same title and the most legitimate site on the entire first page of results is infowars.com, which is not a good thing. (infowars is not credible in my opinion as it is an admitted entertainment site, and I find the concept of news mixed with entertainment to be really stupid)(news about entertainment is ok and entertainment about news is ok, but 'entertainment journalist' is an oxymoron, and a dangerous one.)
So why is Intellihub linked in with all this crap?
Who is this author, Shephard Ambellas?
https://archive.fo/c9kEA
Bragging that Intellihub is in the top 1% of internet traffic worldwide, and that he has been featured on drudge and alex jones, means basically nothing to me. His big stories have been the body bag/FEMA camp articles, the Denver Airport for the Travel Channel and 150 stories about the Las Vegas shooting. He's in a band and has a radio show starting in March.
I try to find information on him from Wikipedia, but only find this:
http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Shepard_Ambellas
Speedy deletion is a site for things that wikipedia won't allow. Interesting.
The search for Shepard on DDG returns a grab bag of the Un-credible and batshit:
https://archive.fo/5Gsi0
Drudge, Infowars, Coast to Coast, UFO's, shtfplan.com, thedailysheeple.com, shiftshaper.org, secretsofthefed.com, sinav.wikidee.org, fellowshipoftheminds.com, just a ton of other un-credible pseudo-nooz crap.
We get no background on the person, no single credible organization for which he has worked and really no other information that couldn't have been found elsewhere or simply made up. Nothing about this guy adds up or can be supported with any other sources, anywhere, at any time in his long career.
This movie exists:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4529552/
but no reviews, no production company, it's like a ghost movie, just like his ghost career.
We are supposed to believe that all this stuff somehow supports him, that intellihub.com generates enough revenue for this guy to live on and that he constantly travels just following the stories like some kind of Indiana Jones. We are supposed to believe that the fact that other non-credible pseudo-nooz sources pick up his stuff is by accident or against his will, what can he do to stop it? We are supposed to believe that his expose's on the Bilderburger group are what keeps him off wikipedia and somehow suppressed.
Notice the narrow scope of his work. Sure he has 150 articles on Las Vegas, but why only one on the Saudi Royal connection, the single biggest factor in the whole thing? It appears to me that by having so many articles with so little conclusive evidence, and no new evidence found himself through his own investigations(as in, I have heard everything he writes about elsewhere before, and sooner than he wrote about it) that he is only adding to the confusion, and the confusion he adds echoes all over the internet to the milleniumreport and thedailysheeple etc.
So let's look at our checklist:
stupid website name - check
no journalistic background at a school - check
no journalistic background at a brick and mortar newspaper - check
no wikipedia article for website - check
no wikipedia article for person - check
cited by dozens of less credible pseudo-nooz sites - check
no known location - check
projects with no other credible references, ie the 'shade' movie - check
topics are edgy but never ground-breaking - check
topics embarrass the u.s. government but not too badly- check
full surveillance integration with facebork and google - check
no actual investigation performed by himself personally, he only re-reports information from elsewhere - check
only people who let him on their shows are coast to coast, drudge and infowars - check
Case closed. Intellihub is a site that is intended to make a fool out of you and when you cite it, anyone, including myself, is going to consider you dull in the head, because you are demonstrating you are incapable of doing this research yourself.
Sure, some will complain that wikipedia won't let you on it, but can you see why? Wikipedia requires references to other things to be credible. I do believe Mr. Ambellas that he is in the top 1% of internet traffic, as his postings are clickbait and he is integrated with a network of other websites. Google and other search engines rank things highly that are referenced in many places. We can now say this is a pattern of disinformation. Iit is no good to create a single site, you want to create a network of nooz sites and nooz-people to support one another in their nooz.
Operations of disinformation agents have many obvious patterns, but only if you actually perform a few of the steps demonstrated here will ever you notice them. These people don't just want to convince you that they are credible when they are not, they want to convince you that everything else is not credible, including wikipedia and now the hot topic is that youtube is censoring, and of course take potshots at the 'mainstream media'. You will find that people like myself and those listed in my list of favorite credible sources are not engaged, they/we are ignored.
Another intent is to weaken your mind, so that you give up on Truth Now altogether. So that when you search for any topic of your personal interest that might be related to the real geo-politics of the world, you get mainstream sources you know are going to be national propaganda and then a flood of obvious 'milleniumreport/dailysheeple' type sites that are just obviously making shit up. Then you will never know, unless you read my blog, to look for sources like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, WhoWhatWhy, Radio4all.net, and Mickey Huff's Project Censored among many other sources that will never even show up on the first page of searches due to the automated work of liars.
In fact it should be clear that people like Mr. Ambellas and the clowns over at "Disobedient Media" like Elizabeth Lea Vos are intentionally mimicking credible people, and spreading their disinformation in the form of things that are credible.
This is what mendacity is, this is what Mendicants do. They get paid to destroy True things in any way possible, and in a place like the United States where censorship is difficult and all of the actual facts eventually get leaked or otherwise revealed, their only option is a tidal wave of lies. If any one person learns a fact, they study how that happened, and dress all their lies up in exactly the same pattern of 'Truthiness'. On the web, these tactics have been weaponized and automated. One person in a disinformation operation will manage maybe 100 different pseudo-nooz sites and personas(this is also why when you address them or contact them it takes a few days or a week to get back to you, they are busy in their other personas and often have to ask their managers how to handle situations, like when someone like me holds their feet to the fire.)
Disinformation Tells (non-exclusive listing, of course)
-author has no background or one that could have been easily fabricated
-stupid website name
-limited scope of interest
-clearly sided scope of interest
-clearly excluded critical information(ie as of this time you will find none of the sites I am investigating even once looking at Trump's financial ties to the mafia)
-no actual investigation, all of their work could be done from a desk
-few if any personal appearances and if there is one it will be staged or easily managed
-their work will be re-transmitted across dozens or more even less credible sites
-their work will get the backing of automated upvotes at sites like reddit, voat, twitter, facebork and steemit
-their work will have tons of shallow 'you go girl!' 'nice job!' comments from even less credible accounts
-their livelihood will seem to come from nowhere, or they will claim 'crowdfunding' for which there is no actual campaign on record
-their websites all look the same and will be integrated with facebrok and all manner of sketchy tracking
-their work will tend to support a feeling or angle or suspicion, but will never be truly actionable, reproduceable or confirmable(ie FEMA camp reports, the single Denver airport whistleblower)
-their work will have elements of Truth, but those Truths will be eclipsed or absorbed by misdirection or cruft.
-their work will not be tied to any legal cases, journalists at larger institutions like the NYT or Wall Street
-their work will make use of elements of mainstream stories(i.e. quotes from NBC) while they simultaneously say they hate the mainstream media
-all around, their work sucks and they say a lot of things without helping or contributing to anything decent
-when questioned about the sketchy nature of their work and background, they will be evasive, manipulative, act very busy, play the victim and then attack the questioner as if operating from a manual (see, of course, my interactions with suzie3d and the conscious resistance)
Try it out for yourself. In fact, I'll give you another site to investigate that may or may not fit this pattern, tell me the results of your personal investigation in comments:
http://www.collective-evolution.com/about-us/
News or Pseudo-nooz? You tell me. (this one should be ez though)
Support actual independent research and analysis, stop upvoting fake crap:
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Open to comments and questions(because I am not afraid of mere words), let's discuss!
I'm trying out the informationwar and stewardsofgondor tags, I'd like to welcome new readers if you came from those channels!
(but if you bring bullshit into my blog, I will flag and mute you. Only actual readers of the content are welcome, only comments that pertain to the content are welcome. This should go without saying but it has been repeatedly demonstrated it needs to be said. thanks.)